The invention relates generally to process management systems, and more particularly to decision support systems for selection and scheduling in a clinical setting, such as healthcare delivery institutions or hospitals.
Currently clinical process decisions have historically relied on the art of understanding symptoms and diagnosing causality much in alignment with the practice of the medical diagnosis arts. In an ever-evolving environment, judgment and experientially-developed mental models are utilized by the healthcare providers to utilize the information currently at hand to offer guidance to patients and make course of treatment decisions unilaterally. Presented with similar data, the decision made from one caregiver to another typically exhibits a variation. Presented with partial information, which is a byproduct of being organized in functional departments, specialties, and roles and by the nature of having partial and/or current or dated information availability on hand, clinical process decisions vary widely and typically are locally focused. Therefore, presented with limited information, the clinical decision is typically for a procedure with the clinical indication or outcome that is sought, regardless of a) the patient's or payer's ability to pay, b) the accumulated probabilities of a given treatment pathway or dose on a comparative basis, or c) the totality of a patient's ability to comply with the series of treatment path steps or of a provider's ability to schedule.